


Pochemuchka

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Awkward Crush, Crushes, Early in Canon, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 07:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14492205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: She talks to herself. It’s almost too good to be true. In fact he’s sure it’s too good to be true for a good long while.





	Pochemuchka

**Author's Note:**

> A season 1 one-shot. Thing-a-Month for April.

 

She talks to herself. It’s almost too good to be true. In fact he’s sure it’s too good to be true for a good long while.

He dismisses it the first time. The second, third, twenty-third time, he’s sure it’s something he’s imagined, though he can’t imagine why he would.

It’s out of character. Well, it’s out of _his_ character. The one he’s writing every minute of his waking life. The one who feels like she’s constantly, insistently rippling beneath his skin. Pouring out of him whether he actually means to be writing or not.

And now, this. She _talks_ to herself, and it seems so damned unlikely. So damned inconvenient at this point, really.

He’s struggling with it already. Nikki’s voice. Her silence. He’s struggling with how much of what she _doesn’t_ say at any given moment. Struggling with how much is native reserve and how much is repression.

Not repression.

_Pain. Loss. Trauma._

Some of it _has_ to be that. He’s sure of it at his keyboard, and not at all sure as he toils along in her wake at scene after scene. Interrogation after interrogation. She’s indomitable. Implacable. She’s any number of four-syllable words, one after the other, and most of the time it seems absurd to think there’s anything about her that _isn’t_ native. Isn’t essential in the most literal sense of the word. Most of the time, he’s sure that’s true, except . . .

 _It was my mom . . ._

It’s true and it’s not true, and he worries about it. He worries how faithful he’s being to _her,_ and even though it doesn’t matter—even though it’s not the kind of book where nature versus nurture is likely to make any kind of appearance—he knows _he_ has to know. He needs to understand how much is left of who she was born to be, and how much she’s learned. How much she’s had to learn in the life she’s lived in the decade since.

 _It was my mom . . ._

* * *

He spends nights ruthlessly stripping things back. He spends nights and days and weeks completely dissatisfied with what he has, so he dives in whenever there’s time. He stumbles home in the thin light of dawn—in the blackest hour of night—and never even thinks about sleep.

He drops into his desk chair and gets to it. He pares down her dialogue to a bare minimum. He lifts every single line of inner monologue out, ruthlessly deleting it outright at first, but it’s too much. It’s too miserable. Too frustrating, so he backs up and up and up, his fingers frantically mashing the familiar key combination. He hits the wall again and again and has to make a panicked dive for one of what swells to a dozen earlier versions. He forces himself to start all over again, lifting it all line by line to a second document and earning every single thing he puts back. He’s been brutal about making sure he _knows_ it’shonest before he pastes a single word back into the flow of things.

That’s where he is one morning—one night, maybe? He stares dumbly through the glass wall of his office, but the city is packed in with fog. It’s no help at all, and he’s been up for what feels like days. But that’s where he’s been, whittling his fucking word count down to practically nothing, when she calls.

He answers reflexively. He nods and gestures and barks out his minimalist end of the conversation. They have it down pat, and it strikes him that it matters—how efficient they’ve become with each other. The hard-edged cadence they’ve fallen into _matters_.

And maybe that’s why he finds himself still at it even as he’s hopping into his jeans one leg at a time. He settles for the electric shaver at his desk so he can keep hacking away. He mails himself the file—the whole column of files, because God knows it’s a collection of ragged ends—and he keeps on tapping away the whole ride on the subway and the whole long stumble up the stairs.

The gray settles around his shoulders. He weaves in and out of foot traffic, tapping away, because it matters. And when he finally makes it to the crime scene, suddenly there it is.

She talks to herself. 

She is—right then, in that moment—undeniably talking to herself, and that matters, too. It matters that it’s detached from any pretense at taking notes, even though she’s crouched over the body, idly tapping a pen against her thigh. It matters that she’s there and not there. She’s both the center of things and miles away from anyone else, and she’s talking to herself, and it matters to Nikki. It matters to him.

His first instinct is to tease her about it. His second instinct, really, because his first to ask. To interrogate, because he’s picked up a thing or two from her. His first instinct is to advance and turn the tables, but sleep-addled and rough cheeked as he is, he knows it’s the wrong thing. Not that teasing her is the right thing, but it’s . . . useful.

She always falls for it. It surprises him every time, but she does. She rises to the bait, one way or another, every single time, and he files away the sudden realization that’s out of character, too. Out of _his_ character, because Nikki never falls for it, but _she_ does. She blushes and stammers. Or she slings something right back at him. She annihilates him just as often and leaves him the one blushing, but she _falls_ for it.

The reality of it drives the moment. The usefulness pries his big mouth open, and he teases her about it.

“Is it a work thing?” He catches her off guard. Totally off guard.

“What?” She drops back on her heels. Hard and literal. She fixes him with a devastating glare, but there’s color in her cheeks. There’s the tell-tale hand coming up to sweep a nonexistent lock of hair back behind her ear.

“The patter.” He’s _completely_ caught her, and it’s like a drug. “The rich, not-so-internal life you’ve got going on here, Detective.” He drops to a crouch next to her. Invades her space in a way he wouldn’t have had the courage to even five minutes ago. “Is it a work thing, or does Nikki talk to herself at home?” He lets his eyes go wide. _Lets_ , but not really, because the idea knocks him in the ribs and the gasp isn’t entirely manufactured. “Does she sing in the shower?”

“How would I know what your stripper does in her spare time?”

She rises. She _uncoils_ in one smooth, gorgeous fucking motion, and the balance of power shifts back to her just like that. He’s hauling himself up, awkward and toiling in her wake all over again.

“I can make it up,” he mutters. It’s meant to be a threat. It’s meant to sound like he’s _not_ toiling, but it’s petulant. It’s stupid. "If you won't  _tell_ me, I can just make it all up." 

“Isn’t that what you do anyway?” she says it right to him. Pointedly right to him as she stalks off. “Isn’t that what you’re _constantly_ doing?”

She strides over to Ryan and Esposito, and it stings. The barb itself and her body language. The fact that she’s so fucking self-possessed as she catches up and catches _them_ up. She’s composed without being stiff, but he already _knows_ that about her. He knows all that, and it somehow leaves him doubting himself all over again.

He thinks about the dozens of documents with all their ragged ends. How he’ll have to tear the most recent all apart, because now he doubts every single thing he thought he knew five minutes ago. Everything he was sure that mattered so recently. He _despairs_ and trails over to her just as their coffee klatch breaks up. Just as Ryan wanders away looking thoughtful and eager and Esposito glowers as he flips open his phone.

“So, what . . .?” It’s a question, rapidly devolving into a defense as she turns on him. As she stops him dead in his tracks.

“Is it about the case?” She makes a sharp gesture to the body behind him. “Whatever you were going to ask. Is it about the victim?”

“Yes?” He twists to look over his shoulder. To look back at her. She’s caught him out this time, and it’s depressingly typical. He clears his throat. He squares his shoulders and tries to find his footing again. “About the victim—”

“Good.” She cuts him off. She brushes right by him, and there’s something in it. A hard-edged glare, but something else, too, in the glance she shoots over her shoulder as she drops low near the body again.

It’s not an apology, though it’s not _not_ one, either. It’s not an invitation, but it is, and he takes her up on it. He waits a breath and follows. He times it perfectly, and she does, too. A new cadence they’re just learning. 

He takes up his post on the other side of the body. He dips down to see what she sees, and just catches it.

“ _Pochemuchka._ ”

A single word, and she lets him catch her. She pointedly ignores him, smiling into her own shoulder. Frowning over the details of the body and pretending like she doesn’t see him fumbling with his phone. Like she isn’t following the rapid-fire tap of his thumbs and watching him sound it out under his own breath.

_Pochemuchka_

She talks to herself.

She talks to herself in Russian. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Pochemuchka — Russian — A person, often a child, who asks too many questions. 
> 
> This certainly didn't end up being what I envisioned when I started, but here it is, the end of the month.


End file.
